The Law And The Profits

Economic royalism, and the political infrastructure carefully designed to support it, took a beating Thursday in several courts, even if you don't count the one that convicted the McDonnells in Virginia. There's no telling how any of these cases will end up; the other side has hundreds of lawyers and the money to pay all of them. But, for a day, anyway, some ground was gained back against the awful plutocratic momentum that has gathered in so many of our institutions. Let us begin with the most delightful one. A federal district judge down in Louisiana beat British Petroleum like the fugitive vandal that company has been since BP and its corporate partners despoiled the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010.

The judge essentially divided blame among the three companies involved in the spill, ruling that BP bears 67 percent of the blame; Swiss-based drilling rig owner Transocean Ltd. takes 30 percent; and Houston-based cement contractor Halliburton Energy Service takes 3 percent. In his 153-page ruling, Barbier said BP made "profit-driven decisions" during the drilling of the well that led to the deadly blowout. "These instances of negligence, taken together, evince an extreme deviation from the standard of care and a conscious disregard of known risks," he wrote.

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There not being an acceptable legal phrase for "Not Giving A Fk Who You Poison Or Kill," Judge Carl Barbier made it quite clear in English that three very large multinational corporations wanted to make a buck to the exclusion of anything else, including the lives of their employees and the livelihood of Christ alone knows how many people around the Gulf. This moves all those BP Cares For You commercials that we'll be seeing all weekend during football games into the realm of unintentional comedy.

The ruling means BP could face as much as $17.6 billion in civil fines under the Clean Water Act, said David Uhlmann, a University of Michigan law professor and former chief of the Justice Department's environmental crimes section. "It also repudiates BP's claims that it was merely negligent and will further damage BP's already badly damaged reputation," Uhlmann wrote in an email.

Of course, companies like these can't run amuck like this without the cooperation of politicians elected specifically to allow them to run amuck because, you know, job creation. To do this, it helps if you can finagle the election laws so that the wrong people find it difficult to vote. Which brings us to what happened in Ohio, where yet another federal district judge broke out the hammer on Secretary of State Jon Husted and his plan to trim back early voting in that state.

Economus granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP of Ohio, League of Women Voters of Ohio and a host of church groups and voting rights advocates. The plaintiffs challenged Senate Bill 238, which Gov. John Kasich signed into law in February, as well as directives issued by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted. Economus said in his 71-page ruling that they were unconstitutional and a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling means Ohio voters will be allowed to vote 35 days before Election Day and they'll have the opportunity to register and vote in the same week...Economus found that SB238 and Husted's directives on early voting "significantly burden the right to vote of African Americans, the homeless and lower-income individuals."

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Feature, of course, and not a bug. I would like to point out that Husted is running for re-election against Nina Turner -- star of stage, screen, and MSNBC -- and that voter suppression is just about the only issue in that campaign.

"This is a great day for Ohio voters. Despite efforts to restrict and reduce the opportunities for Ohioans to cast a ballot, the court has thankfully sided with voters once again. While we should not have to rely on federal courts to ensure working Ohioans have convenient options to cast a ballot, this was the right decision," she said in a written statement.

And, last, the entire federal circuit court in the District Of Columbia will take up the fact that two Republican judges turned common sense on its head and defunded a big hunk of the Affordable Care Act because, in the opinion of this pair of deuces, the law was deliberately designed not to work the way it was deliberately designed to work. The plaintiffs want to push the whole thing past the full bench and onto the Nine Wise Souls across the street from the Capitol. That is unlikely to happen. Instead, I expect to see the plaintiffs lashed to the side of the whale as it sounds for the last time into the depths of the Potomac. In any case, this was a pretty good day.